


You Got Nothing to Dread

by isozyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant (Almost), Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 16:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Two aliens with bright spiraled horns, running.  They can travel greater distances by skipping across time and making folds in space, but they are harder to track when they travel by more mundane ways, so they combine both: flickering through dreambubbles, at a sprint.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They are two very different types of god.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Got Nothing to Dread

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vulpineRaconteur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulpineRaconteur/gifts).



Don't you know you got nothing dread,  
though you know you got a coffin to drag  
Don't you know you got nothing to fear,  
every girl's got a secret to wear  
 _\- The Noisettes_

 

*

Aradia has her feet planted on the ground when she sees it first -- a cornea-aching frill of colors sprinting across empty space -- and she wonders if what happens next will be interesting. No matter what, she’s expecting something big.

The landscape here is red-packed earth, studded with petrol depots sitting lightly on the plains like stilt-legged bugs. A blue neon sign hums above her: “KUM & GO” glows obscenely across the desert. Of the five or six she’s wandered to, this petrol depot is Aradia’s very favorite so far. Whatever kid died to make this bubble was an odd quackbeast, to make a Land like this.

The dreambubbles are all empty, all the inhabitants either ghost-conscripted or incinerated, so the things have gotten terribly dull.

She springs up to the roof and flops down on her back, letting the sun-baked tar-coated gravel burn and prickle along her wings and gum up her god-tier smock. The sky is vibrant indigo fading into black, but it’s _splitting._ Aradia has time to briefly contemplate this, then the air beside her snaps and becomes briefly a gap of freezing void. The softened tar flash freezes with a hiss. Aradia blinks and above her there’s the Handmaid, rebellion’s psychopomp, tall and faintly crackling.

“No,” the dread harbinger of death says, not to Aradia. Her blank eyes narrow as she casts about across the landscape, her whole posture wary. Everything about her screams _ready to take something apart with claws alone._ “ _No!_ ” she shouts to the sky. Her accent and vocabulary are archaic but the words burrow into Aradia’s skull and she gets the drift. “I’m not doing this anymore, _fuck this_.” The drift is remarkably specific.

The Handmaid notices Aradia and lashes out with something that sears. Aradia can tell she’s reacting, not thinking, and assures herself that this is neither heroic nor just.

As the shock and pain rushes up to flood her senses, Aradia sees recognition strike the Handmaid like a blow.

*

From the outside: two aliens with long dark hair, one dead (briefly), both immortal (conditionally), on the roof of a gas station. Around them is the landscape of a dead child’s memories of a the game that killed him. The taller alien kneels down next to her fallen double and touches the edge of her crumpled wings.

Then she hoists the corpse by the armpits, glares around at the empty horizon, and struggles to drag it to the edge of the roof. There’s a lip where the gas station’s brightly-colored facade hangs over the top, and she fights against the dead weight in her arms.

With a shudder of annoyance, she vanishes in a clap of multi-colored light.

*

Post sparkle-motion resurrection sequence, Aradia opens her eyes in a flower shop. The Handmaid is there, methodically picking blossoms off a wand of gladiolus flowers.

“Hello,” Aradia says, rising to float at the Handmaid’s eye level.

She turns and looks at Aradia in abject horror. “I didn’t want to meet you. I set a wide net of things in motion so you would die,” she says, without preamble. The Handmaid is, apparently, a terrible conversationalist.

“It didn’t take,” Aradia tells her. “It was never meant to, I don’t think. Destiny is hard.”

The Handmaid flinches.

Outside is Alternia, or a version of it. Some troll kid who didn’t know she was dead fancied that she’d once been to a flower shop, so here it is, perfect down to the petals. Aradia ignores the vista to stare openly at the Handmaid, relishing the view of her grown-up self. Her face would have become drawn and her horns would curl heavy over her ears, rough and worn like coils of briny rope. The Handmaid has no scars. There’s no inflammation in her ancient joints, no burns tightening the skin of her face, but she still looks her age.

“So, what’s your name?” Aradia asks. The Handmaid finishes destroying her flower and hisses at Aradia. Aradia grins in return. “I’m Aradia. We’re related.”

“You’re not supposed to -- don’t -- don’t do that,” the Handmaid says. She’s visibly rattled, despite being the Demoness who’s plagued Aradia’s civilization from start to meteor-granted finish. Illuminated from behind by the light of a cooler filled with roses, she almost looks translucent. “I left, I escaped, I have shaken the chains of my confinement for one brief moment and, fuck me, no, here’s a cheery little girl with my face telling me we’re related.”

She looks hungrily lonely. Aradia doesn’t have to wonder why the Handmaid stayed with her body, and is not bolting for the hills even now -- it’s writ plain across her face.

It’s a familiar expression to Aradia. Vriska never wore it, but Vriska spent too much time working her way into other people’s heads to ever feel crushed by lack of company. Sollux would get that way, after she had died, when he hadn’t bothered to let anyone touch him for a few perigrees -- punchy and hyper-aware of another being’s regard, desperate for someone to pay attention to him but uncomfortable under their scrutiny until his sharp wit turned cruel.

“You’re not glad for the company?” Aradia asks, and winks, so the Handmaid doesn’t have to address the truth in her words.

“This is a bad idea,” the Handmaid says. She sounds defeated already. Aradia can hear the time-tempered ring of truth in the words. It is definitely a bad idea. “I will things so much worse, no matter what I do. You know it can be worse, don’t you?”

“That’s okay,” Aradia says. “It’ll be how the timeline wants it to be. You fight it and fight it and you always play into its hands in the end, and it’s exhausting. It’s better to let it be, and enjoy the nice things it allows you to have.”

“How can you live like that?” the Handmaid asks. She reaches out and wraps a hand around Aradia’s jaw, holding her still, as her blank eyes flash rust, rust, rust, gold. Her claws prickle into Aradia’s skin, and Aradia freezes obediently, while her bloodpusher twists with a little misplaced thud at the attention.

The Handmaid drops her abruptly. “I made you too cruel,” she says, and Aradia rankles at the implicit ownership in the phrase. She rubs at the places where the Handmaid has pressed her skin with her claws, and feels wetness.

Far off, the fabric of reality shudders, and they both feel it. The Handmaid’s master has noticed her absence. Aradia wipes her fingers on her red tunic, and darts after the Handmaid, who has already risen to flee.

*

Two aliens with bright spiraled horns, running. They can travel greater distances by skipping across time and making folds in space, but they are harder to track when they travel by more mundane ways, so they combine both: flickering through dreambubbles, at a sprint.

There's seams, in dreambubbles, that make them stumble. They run across tennis courts and snowdrifts and pick their way through toy-strewn bedrooms. They stand briefly, chests heaving, with feet on smooth black pebbles, looking out over a fierce violet sea, while behind them lurks the hollowed-out space of a cathedral, silence echoing as loud as the pounding surf.

They stop in a cave, because the more ancient of the two falls to her knees.

*

“It’s your dress,” Aradia says, gesturing to the long green tail of it that’s tangled in the Handmaid’s ankles.

“It is a mark of office,” the Handmaid says, bracing herself against the side of the cave as she stands. Her gaze skitters over the paintings on the wall beside her hand and she bares her teeth.

Aradia frowns, and decaptchalogues a shirt and a ratty skirt with a soft ding. “You’re running away,” she says. “You should dress up! Play the part, Handmaid.”

It’s not the dress, but Aradia knows about deflecting and redirecting. The Handmaid strips, with a practiced callousness that shows how had she works to not care about the vulnerability of flesh. Efficiency and brutality are painted over her wounds like layers of lacquer, dried hard and slick into a brittle shell. Her revealed skin is darker, where the searing radiation of space hasn’t bleached it. It looks softer than the rest of her, and when she’s pulled Aradia’s old clothes over herself dusky strips of flesh peek around the edges. The shirt is too small; it tugs across the Handmaid’s shoulders, but she runs a finger over the symbol on the chest and smiles.

Aradia slips the green dress into a captcha card, for later.

Outside of the cave is their old meteor, a perfect replica down to the stale taste in the air. The Handmaid walks, wondering, out into it, ducking her head so that her horns do not bash against the low ceiling. Her footfalls clang softly. Aradia trails after her, curious about what the Handmaid is after.

She bends and picks up a spent fiduspawn plushie, its soft cotton innards trailing on the floor. “You’re children. Hah, tiny moltlets, fighting to the death. It’s almost funny --” but her facade is crumbling, and she’s shut her eyes so the kaleidoscope flash of them is hidden. “You had to be so brave, when they told you that dirt ran through your veins. When the games you played took your eyes and your limbs and your brightness and your lives and they told you, they told you it had made you weak.” The Handmaid whispers the last: “I did this.”

This, Aradia thinks, is a teachable moment. She tugs the toy out of the Handmaid’s loose grasp and fists her claws in her borrowed shirt, bunching up her symbol and pressing her knuckles up against the Handmaid’s breast, anchoring herself in the Handmaid’s line of sight. She expects the skin to be warm through the fabric but it’s cold, royally cold.

“They were wrong!” Aradia says, earnestly. “We knew they were wrong! And how dare you waltz in here, where we acted out our puppet lives, and talk like it was all your doing. Like you had any more control than we did, like you care more about our dead than we do. Shame on you. Of course they were wrong.”

The Handmaid opens her eyes and stares down multicolor fire into Aradia’s face and Aradia realizes who she’s got her hands on. She’d dressed her up and watched her shiver and thought that she’d tamed something. In her ire the Handmaid becomes unknowable and powerful.

The Handmaid’s lashes are vivid scarlet all the way around, just like Aradia’s, and the skull underneath the skin and muscle of her face is the same shape. Aradia can almost map it by the ridges where the flesh is thin, like she had when she was younger, pressing her fingers into her own face, finding the sockets and arches like she saw in all the skulls she’d dug from her hiveplot.

“You don’t know what I’ve done,” the Handmaid says. “I have shaped your whole universe.”

“And we survived!” Aradia says hotly.

“Fifty percent,” the Handmaid says, crisply. “And of the ones who are left, which of you is unharmed? And more -- if you had hatched a few hundred sweeps before the game, would your numbers be even half as cheery? Signless’s get, the Disciple’s girlchild, _you?_ ” On the last word the Handmaid plucks Aradia’s claws from her front. “Fifty percent wouldn’t even have made it to the reckoning.”

“Death is not so terrible,” Aradia says, rubbing her hands together to warm the chill out of her fingers. “Everything ends.”

The Handmaid laughs, and it’s ugly. “And the desert’s a lovely place for a holiday, says the fishtroll to the leviathan. How long do you intend to stay alive, little god?”

“How long do you?”

“Not my call,” the Handmaid says, and chucks Aradia under the chin. “We’re going somewhere. I believe we have enough of a lead on him.”

*

It is difficult (rather, impossible) to travel in straight lines, in the dreambubbles. Their path is winding. They pass battleships frozen in the sky, and walk a highway lined with designer shoe stores, lit up in the night. There’s a warm salty ocean covered in a lace of rafts made up of bottles and caps and nets and trash. They weave through empty, loud clubs, beer tacky on the floor, the occasional crash of a glass succumbing to gravity. There’s countless warm little bedrooms, and a beach made entirely out of fishbones, and a diffuse planet that’s just car-sized cubes of grass suspended in the endless void.

When the terrain is treacherous they hold hands, and when one hesitates before stepping out over a drop, the other is always there to give a gentle push into the void.

*

The Handmaid stops them on a boat.

All around them the pier sways, lush with warm yellow light. The emptiness of the streets stands a sharp counterpoint to the sound of music and the crash of revelry in the distance. The ship is built on archaic floor-plans, made of teak and laser-cut steel, but it's got a sound hull. There's notches on the mast, one for every vessel brought down. They begin in orderly rows around eye level, and devolve into slashes and splintering gashes circling the wood, hundreds of marks.

The door to below-decks is open, and the Handmaid waves Aradia downwards. They're both faintly effervescent, so the darkness parts to let them pass.

There's a tiny closet with a heavy lock on the door. The Handmaid lays the flat of her hand on it and it jerks out of existence, turning into whatever impossible dream-stuff stands in for proper atoms in the world of the dead.

She takes Aradia by the wrist and makes her touch the wall. Under her palm the wood is soft and crumbling. It's blackened in a perfect circle. "Familiar?" the Handmaid asks. At Aradia's stare of incomprehension, she hisses and the room fills with the burned-ash smell of plasma rifle fire and a fading sizzling sound, like water flicked at a hot pan. The Handmaid sweeps out of the small room and taps the lintel as she passes, an old gesture to ward off sorrow. Aradia’s seen ghosts that still do it.

She follows.

The Handmiad kicks her way into the captain's quarters, which are a mess. The hulls of nuts and fruits are scattered over soft silks, and tin of mechanic's grease sits neatly inside a worked metal chalice. It smells like perfume and overspiced meat. There's a metal arm in the middle of the bed, the aluminum skin over the shoulder peeled back for repairs.

Deftly, the Handmaid uncovers a hidden drawer and picks out a little book bound in blue. She flips it open, rips out a page, and hands it to Aradia. It's a picture done in scratchy cerulean ink of a troll with one horn crooked like a fishing hook. It's difficult to tell from the way the Handmaid's torn the edges, but Aradia thinks that she has been depicted without a shirt. "She's dead," the Handmaid says. "She died just there, down the hallway. It caught her by surprise, and no one said goodbye to her. I could go now, change things, if it pleased me. It does not, although I set her on the path that ended her life. So -- is this my doing or is it the will of the universe? Should I regret what I have done to her?"

Aradia puts the little portrait on the captain's desk, and appropriates one of the map weights to weigh it down and cover the resemblance to her friend's face. "It's not useful to think like that. The thought experiment is flawed," Araida says.

The Handmaid towers in cold fury, brightening until the corona of light around her makes Aradia's pupils tighten into slits. "Then I am telling her story wrong. When she was young she liked to sew, and catch butterflies, and ate her grub cakes icing-first, and I told her she could do anything. When I asked her to steal a screaming grubling from the caves she looked at me wide-eyed and asked me how to stop him crying, and I told her to take him out to the desert. When the Signless, her son, came back to her with psionic burns from hip to ankle and the grin of the blessed on his face, I told her that I would protect him better the next time, and the next. When I did not protect him the last time, I watched her scream at his killers and I shielded them from the meaning of her words, so all they heard was hysteria instead of grief, and I did not tell her why."

"You're a closed loop," Aradia protests, because she's thought this through, she knows all the twists and turns of this argument. "A clone! Who wouldn't exist except for the consequences of your own actions, laid down before you were even created. Blame is a meaningless construct. Guilt, the same!"

"So it was a clean thing? No."

"Suffering over what you cannot change is like crying over spilt sopor." It's simple.

The Handmaid is flaring and shaking like a flame caught in a draft, and she says, voice breaking, "When the Dolorosa died she was alone, and cold, and she did not know what more they could take from her. She could not change that, and she still suffered. Open your eyes, pupa."

"That's different!" Aradia says, holding her ground. "You say we're just children but there's no evidence that this universe contains anything other than dead adults, immortal evils and us, at the center of a little knot of solipsistic causality." The Handmaid's light gutters lower, and Aradia walks forward, and the words tumble through her lips as she's practiced them, alone in the night to an audience of one. "This is a universe where suffering is theoretical, and this is not a universe where people get to _grow up._ You can't own all the pain in the world. That's not fair to anyone. Let it go."

"Let it go." The Handmaid sighs. Some of the grief lifts from her face and she looks older, more alien. "Yes, that would be best."

Hearing her say it Aradia thinks, against her own expectations, _wait, no._

The room floods with cold, and for a moment the Handmaid looks collected and pleased. Aradia has time to feel like a crab in a trap for only a split second before the Handmaid is trembling with suppressed emotion again, and Aradia is certain she's imagined it.

*

In the distance, even now, she is guiding a boy she loves (a boy who killed her) by the hand through the ship of the girl who made him do it (bygones are bygones).

In the past (not so long ago by some reckoning), she picks a little boy’s lost shoe out of the sand and hands it to a weary jade-blooded nun. She smiles her thanks, and jogs off to catch her charge (her son) and scold him for being careless in the desert.

They are two very different types of god.

*

Aradia once found a dream bubble that was so large it had its own stars, except that the entire western half squeezed itself into a collapsing barn -- she walked east for miles and the horizon unfolded forever, but about-face and in three, four steps she stood breathing hay-dust, squinting against the sunlight crashing in through the gaping roof.

This dream bubble is not so spectacular, but Aradia is deeply fond of it. The little hive in the center has skulls stacked up in the windowsills, each dusted carefully clean. Aradia tosses herself down in the grass, and flicks dew at the Handmaid’s ankles.

The Handmaid smiles at her in a flash of bright fangs. She lies back carefully, arranging Aradia’s ragged skirt around her knees.

“All forgiven?” the Handmaid asks. She must know the history of the place.

Aradia shrugs, and gets damp all over her shoulders. “This is before all that. I was still really little in this memory.” She used to make crowns from the grass flowers when it bloomed. She could show the Handmaid how to weave nut creature skulls in like jewels, if they had time. “I always thought you enjoyed it, being death’s maiden.” The Handmaid’s terrible conversation skills are contagious, Aradia thinks with a small frown.

“It made you abhor me,” the Handmaid says, her voice neutral.

“Yeah.”

“It’s better, to know I’m miserable?”

Aradia grimaces. “No -- yes -- it’s complicated.”

The Handmaid nods. “Destiny is hard,” she says.

Aradia is about to protest, but then their lead runs out.

The air splits with the force of Lord English’s scream. The atoms scatter, leaving cathode-glow trails, while the sound drills right into the insect-hindbrain and trips every flight instinct Aradia has. She sits bolt upright, but the Handmaid reclines, nonplussed. “He’s not here for you, it’s fine.”

“No, we can run, come on,” Aradia says. She spares a moment to be sad that this placid little remainder of her past will be charred extra-crispy well-done, then pushes at the Handmaid’s shoulder, trying to force her to rise. He’s so close she thinks she should be able to see him. “You’re escaping! Don’t give up!”

“No,” the Handmaid says. “My work is done, I’m finished here.”

“What work?” Aradia asks. The noise is gone, but the sickening fear lingers.

The Handmaid rises to her knees, then cups Aradia’s face in both hands and rubs her thumbs gently over Aradia’s cheekbones, infusing them with chill. She’s flickering all over with the balefire of her psionics and it crackles into Aradia’s hair. Her embrace feels like Aradia’s memories of dying.

“Are wrongs done by the will of the timeline still wrong?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Aradia says, suddenly acutely miserable.

“I wish I could have left you as you were,” the Handmaid says. “It must be wonderful, to be certain of everything. Wonderful, and sadly precarious.”

She dives forward and kisses Aradia, cool and slick and deep like falling into a well, no handholds to cling to. Aradia leans into it, and the Handmaid adds her teeth, sharp and frigid like rocks in the rapids, until Aradia’s lips feel raw. It’s awful compensation for her convictions, but the Handmaid doesn’t deal in fair trades.

“Rebellions don’t fall by the wand alone, Aradia Megido. You thought I would kill some ghosts, make your friends sad, and you could ride it out as another piece of your narrative arc. You thought you could heal me into something more monstrous and more whole. Oh, little god of a thousand deaths. It can always be worse,” the Handmaid says.

“ _Damara,_ ” Aradia says, as if a name will change her back, but the Handmaid’s face is smooth like a mask.

“Demoness,” she corrects gently. “Isn’t this what you wanted? The timeline will win and prune off all the paradoxes like an attentive gardener, with you and I its loyal assistants.”

Aradia’s not sure anymore. The indecision grates in her mind like sand in an oyster. “Why?” she asks.

The Handmaid spreads her hands. “Maybe you have one more decision to make. Maybe my Master wanted to shake you up, make the coin toss a little more fun, give you some things to really think about.” She lets Aradia go.

Aradia begins to stand and finds that the Handmaid has dropped her old shirt in her lap. She clutches it as she rises. “You’re a liar.”

The Handmaid, dressed in her old green gown once more, puts her hand on Aradia’s shoulder. “What kind of lesson would that be? There’s a world of truth in my special cup of suffering. I simply also have a job, and a paycheck to collect.”

She’s gone so fast it seems like an illusion. The terror leaves with her as she and her master draw back into paradox space.

*

Aradia leaves by music box, back to the ludicrous Kum & Go in the red desert, and pushes the door to the little shop open. It jingles when it swings shut behind her. She sees herself walking across the parking lot through the grimy window, on time as expected.

“Her name’s Damara,” she calls, and watches herself perk up and step faster.

All at once she realizes that she doesn’t want to talk to herself. She waves, instead, and leaves before her past can get to the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta who is a doll and knows who she is.
> 
> For vulpineRaconteur, to the prompt "Aradia finds the Handmaid, recently arrived in a dream bubble. The Handmaid is angry/distraught about her role in Alternia's history. Aradia, with the knowledge and expertise of a God of Time, is cheerful, because she knows that the Handmaid's actions were all a necessity to the timeline. The Handmaid does not appreciate her attitude. (I know non-SBurb players in dream bubbles isn't exactly canon, I just want interactions between these two.)"
> 
> Thanks very much for the excellent prompt, and I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
